During the invasion of Iraq in 2003, the author, a correspondent for NBC News, spent nearly six weeks embedded with the 3d Battalion, 5th Marine Regiment (“3/5”). Here, he recounts the incident that gave these Marines their initial taste of hostile fire in the war.
It was well before dawn on 25 March 2003, five days after crossing the border, when a Marine leaned over my sleeping bag and shouted: “Stand to, Marine!” I had never heard that expression before and was groggy and confused after only two or three hours of sleep.
“What does that mean?” I asked innocently, while noticing that all the Marines around me were already packing their gear in near-total darkness.
The Marine’s response was a tirade of curse words. He apparently thought I was a Marine who was being a wiseass or, much worse, disobeying an order.
Sitting up quickly, I said: “I’m not a Marine, I’m the news guy!” He went silent for a moment, then said calmy: “Get up. We’re moving out.”
During the five days since the battalion crossed the Iraq border, there had been little sign of enemy forces. But on this day, the Marines of 3/5 finally would find what most of them had been looking for—a fight.
‘All of a Sudden . . . Chaos’
At first light the convoy started moving slowly north. There had been reports of Iraqi forces in the area and the Marines were hyperalert, with M16s, machine guns, and missile launchers at the ready.
A few tanks led the way. The lead vehicle behind the tanks was a Humvee carrying five men belonging to the CAAT Team (Combined Anti-Armor Team). One of their top jobs was to defend the tanks against enemy attack.
The team was led by Lieutenant Brian Chontosh, who was sitting in the front passenger seat of the Humvee. Lance Corporal Armand McCormick was driving. Outside, on the Humvee’s hard back, was 20-year-old Lance Corporal Robert Kerman, who had been asked to join the team that day because Chontosh—who expected an ambush—wanted “another pair of eyes.” And it didn’t hurt that Kerman was an expert marksman.
Standing on the floor of the backseat with his upper body in the turret, Thomas “Tank” Franklin was manning the .50-caliber machine gun, a fearsome weapon that can fire well over 500 5-inch rounds in a minute. Franklin’s nickname was for an obvious reason—he was built like a tank. Finally, sitting in the back seat was radioman Ken Korte.
McCormick had been in the Humvee’s turret on previous days. But on 25 March he and Franklin switched positions: McCormick drove, and Tank moved to the turret—a very fortunate switch, according to McCormick, because “Tank happened to be the best machine gunner in the battalion.”
McCormick was one of the Marines who had been complaining about the lack of action in the previous days. “We were bored,” he later told me. “We were lethargic. Exactly what they tell you never to be when you’re fighting a war.”
He was “falling asleep,” as he put it, and he was about to get a wake-up call.
After covering just under two miles, “everything seemed calm,” Franklin recalled. “But I had a bad feeling.”
Chontosh was the first to notice cause for alarm. A sand berm less than 50 yards to their right, running parallel to the road, looked suspicious. It looked manmade, and it looked new. He radioed Blue One, code name for the tanks immediately ahead of him. He also called the command vehicle, farther back in the convoy.
“All of a sudden,” Franklin said, “it was just chaos.” In an instant, the tanks and other lead vehicles were engulfed in a storm of bullets, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and mortars.
From his standing position in the turret Franklin could see it all—hundreds of enemy soldiers. “They were freaking everywhere. I was swinging the turret this way, and then that way, burning through ammo.”
An RPG flew in front of him and hit a tank less than 30 feet away, doing little damage. Another streaked close behind him. “It was the scariest sound I ever heard,” he said, “that high-pitched scream.”
Into the Kill Zone
Close behind was another Humvee driven by 21-year-old Corporal Scott Smith. Hospital Corpsman Michael “Doc” Johnson, a universally admired 25-year-old Navy medic, was in the back seat. Frankie Quintero was standing on the floor of the back seat, his upper body in the turret, manning a TOW missile launcher.
Smith said they had been sharing a bag of Skittles when the world around them suddenly exploded. An RPG ripped through the side of their lightly armored Humvee. It failed to explode, but hit Quintero in the abdomen, then hit Johnson in the head with so much force that he was propelled out of the vehicle and into the road. It was a fatal hit.
In that chaotic moment Smith said, “I literally lost my mind.” He started screaming into the radio: “Johnson’s dead! Johnson’s dead!”
In the middle of the chaos was the lead Humvee, in which Chontosh and his team were trapped in a “kill zone.” With the tanks immediately in front of them, the rest of the battalion behind them, and berms on both sides, there appeared to be no way out.
So Chontosh decided to do the kind of thing that usually only happens in Hollywood movies. He ordered McCormick to turn right and drive straight into the heart of the enemy attack. McCormick hit the gas. “We were flying,” he told me later. “As fast as I could get that Humvee rolling.”
Marines who witnessed that moment say it was an act of insane courage—or perhaps just insane. Smith, watching from the Humvee behind Chontosh, couldn’t believe what he was seeing. “They turned directly into the fire!” he told me. “I could not comprehend that. It was like driving into the mouth of a dragon or into an image of hell!”
Machine gunner Franklin recalled his first thought as the Humvee made the turn: “Are you f***ing kidding me?” But he never stopped firing, mowing down enemy fighters in their path, and taking out an entrenched Iraqi machine-gun position on the berm. If it hadn’t been for Franklin’s mastery of the .50-caliber machine gun, McCormick said, “All of us would be dead.”
As they sped across the rough terrain Lance Corporal Kerman was hanging onto the hard back of the Humvee like a bucking bronco rider.
Closing in, they noticed a dip in the berm—a passageway to the other side, where they could attack the enemy from the rear. “Take it,” Chontosh said, just before shooting two Iraqis guarding the path. McCormick roared through the opening and crashed the Humvee into a dry irrigation ditch on the other side of the berm. It was full of Iraqi fighters.
Chontosh jumped out, shouting, “Let’s go!”
Run-and-Gun
Chontosh, as an officer, had only his M9 handgun; he grabbed McCormick’s M16 and jumped into the trench, running and shooting as he went. McCormick threw a box of machine-gun ammo to Franklin, who was still firing continuously. Radioman Ken Korte started feeding the .50-cal ammo belts.
McCormick and Kerman jumped into the trench to join Chontosh. McCormick said the Iraqi fighters were so stunned at the sight of the Marines invading their safe haven—and so terrified by Franklin’s deafening .50-caliber machine gun—that most of them ran. The ones who didn’t were shot by Franklin, or by Chontosh, Kerman, and McCormick as they ran down the trench.
Franklin covered his brothers with the .50-cal but had to be careful, because Chontosh, Kerman, and McCormick were so close to the Iraqis he was targeting. “I didn’t want to shoot my guys,” Franklin told me. “I’m covering them the best I can and Chontosh was pointing at where to shoot. ‘Dude, I want to shoot them’ he thought, ‘but I don’t want to shoot you!’”
Rounds from an Iraqi sniper were kicking up sand all around Franklin, but he kept firing, even though his position in the turret left him exposed. “I wasn’t going to abandon them just because somebody was taking shots at me,” he said.
As Chontosh, McCormick, and Kerman continued their run-and-gun down the trench, Kerman looked behind him and saw three Iraqis giving chase. He turned and fired six shots, missing from a mere 30 yards. He was flabbergasted. He was an expert marksman, the best in his company at boot camp. In the chaos, he had picked up somebody else’s M16. The sight was calibrated differently than his own.
He instantly made a mental adjustment, calculating that he had to aim at their knees to hit them in the chest. He fired three shots. All three Iraqis went down.
Chontosh described what happened next: “McCormick was shooting dudes that were coming up over the top of us, and we just went down the trench until our ammo was out. When my ammo ran out, I picked up an AK-47 and shot that. There were plenty of dead people and weapons. We just kept moving, just kept going, picked up another AK-47 and shot that one.” Franklin recalled seeing Chontosh, far down the trench, holding two AK-47s taken from dead enemy soldiers—one in each hand.
Chontosh, McCormick, and Kerman continued about 150 to 200 yards, shooting with whatever abandoned weapons they could find. When they rounded a bend in the trench and passed out of sight, Franklin became terrified for them: “I was like, holy sh*t! I sure hope they come back.”
Moments later, Chontosh stopped because, as he later explained it to me, the “geometry” was bad. They were now directly on the other side of the berm from the main Marine force, which probably was fighting its way in their direction. Most of the battalion had no idea they were there. “We had to get the hell out of there before we got hit by friendly fire,” McCormick said.
On the way back to the Humvee, McCormick found an Iraqi RPG that had not been fired. He handed it to Chontosh and said he should fire it so that an Iraqi couldn’t use it. Neither knew how to shoot it. McCormick told Chontosh: “At least you’ve been to a f***ing weapons course.”
Chontosh figured it out and fired. His citation for the Navy Cross notes that he “used it to destroy yet another group of enemy soldiers.” Taking nothing away from his heroics that day, Chontosh said the citation got it wrong: “It was a terrible shot.” McCormick agreed: “It just tumbled down the trench and never exploded.”
As they ran back to the Humvee, Kerman turned and saw that, once again, they were being pursued—this time by five Iraqis. He recalled stopping and screaming: “F*** this sh*t!” He turned around and got down in the prone shooting position, as marksmen are trained to do for maximum accuracy, and again made the mental adjustment necessary with the other Marine’s M16 he had inadvertently grabbed.
He took two shots, and the two Iraqis in front went down. As two others got down and aimed at him, he hit them with one shot each. He took a breath and aimed carefully at the fifth and pulled the trigger. Five bullets, five down. Kerman remembered Chontosh staring at him in disbelief after his calm display of marksmanship.
At that moment, everything became quiet. The dozens of Iraqis who had been behind the berm were either dead, injured, or had run away. They returned to the Humvee and jumped in. Their task wasn’t done. “Our job wasn’t to be dismounted infantry,” Chontosh later told me. “Our job was to be security for the tanks.”
They sped a short distance up the road, where they found the tanks engaged in another firefight. They joined in but soon got a call on the radio ordering them to return to the main unit, because the artillery platoon was about to start firing and Chontosh’s team was too close to the target zone.
Chontosh didn’t want to leave enemy fighters in the field who might ambush them later. “So we did what we could with those bad guys and returned to the battalion.”
The Aftermath of Battle
When they arrived, they saw that in addition to the two dozen or more Iraqis they had killed behind the berm, there were scores of Iraqi bodies closer to the main road, where the main body of the battalion had fought them. Many of them had run over the berm to get away from Team Chontosh—and went straight into a much larger group of Marines.
In all, more than 100 Iraqis had been killed and about 50 taken prisoner in a battle that lasted, according to several Marines, no more than ten or 15 minutes.
Captain Ethan Bishop climbed over the berm to view the aftermath of the battle in the trench. “It looked like a Civil War scene,” he later told me. “I almost felt bad for the other side. Those Marines were very lethal.”
The enemy force had included many professional Iraqi soldiers, but there also were some who appeared to be conscripts. Some of the prisoners told interrogators that they had fought only because Saddam Hussein’s troops had threatened to kill them—and their families—if they did not fight.
Chontosh received the Navy Cross for leading the charge. McCormick and Kerman received Silver Stars. Franklin and Korte received Commendation Medals.
Only one American had been lost: Hospital Corpsman Michael Johnson. Lance Corporal Frankie Quintero, who had been next to Johnson in the Humvee, was clinging to life but would survive.
Senior Marine officers told me that the list of casualties would have been much longer—if Team Chontosh had not taken such quick, decisive action.